sleep. We drink our tea. We sip our soup. We chew our bread. We wait.
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By the third day we're starting to go stir-crazy and get on each other's nerves. The unknown eats away at what little morale we have. There's bickering among bunkmates. The rest has done us good; the little bit of food still leaves us hungry, but at least we do not burn it all off doing hard labor. We do not gain weight but we do not lose it either.
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"
Raus!
Line up!" It's the fourth morning. An attendant from the hospital enters the block. "March out!" We follow her lead, stepping out of quarantine, marching across the length of camp toward another building. The sign over the door reads
SAUNA
. Inside, the kapo informs us, ''Leave your old clothes in a pile here. You no longer need them. There are new uniforms on that table.
Schnell!
''
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Stepping naked over to the table, we snatch up the new one-size-fits-all uniforms, pulling them over our bodies. They're exactly like our other blue-and-gray striped dresses, rough as unworn sandpaper.
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"Put these aprons on, too!" We tie clean, white, pressed aprons around our waists as we line up again, filing out of the building in twos. We march back across the length of the compound in front of the rest of the women in camp already lined up for morning roll call. The next building we enter is in the middle of the camp; it's a small, one-room building across from our blocks. It's Mengele's office. Inside, the nurse orders us to hold out our arms so the secretary can write down each of our numbers on a list. "1716," she repeats under her breath, "2779." It's strange that we do not have numbers on our uniforms. Outside again, we line up facing the camp roll call, in neat rows of five, ten to each line, forming our new, exclusive work detail. I wonder where Emma is; I wonder if she will even notice that Danka and I are gone.
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It is strange to watch regular camp roll call and not be a part of
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